Back to Wormholing

When: Wednesday 10th March 2011
Where: J140135 entrance in JK-Q77
Who:
Sarek - cov ops/ stealth/ industrial
Sakisakhr - Nemesis, then another Nemesis :)
Slayfoe - Myrmidon gas miner
Carraig naTairbhe - Myrmidon gas miner
N'ascent - Cov ops
What happened: logged in to find Sarek and N'ascent playing with a cov ops from a C5 WH in JK. Joined the chase round the system before the intruder headed back for the WH and wasn't seen again. The WH had 13 anomolies, 1 grav and 12ish ladar sites - none with C320 or C540 that the corp required. Sakissakhr made the POS owner happy when he got the might of THIS FULLY OPERATIONAL deathstar in the face and got one-shotted while admiring the Moros in the shields.
Slay drained a Sizeable Perimiter Reservoir with 2 x gas mining Myrmidons - KW really needs some Gas Harvester IIs. Had to go fetch the Ishtar and refit for armour repping to kill 6 sleeper frigates.

Another severe PVP lesson

I lost 2 Iskurs three days ago. I have been thinking about it since and have drawn a few conclusions. I have Tester128 to thank for these harsh lessons*. He was flying a Pilgrim, a recon ship (covert tech 2 cruiser) with what must have been an entire rack of energy neutralizers in his highs, and a peculiar tank in which his armour collapsed as fast as his shields. He used drones as his dps.


Lesson 1: My armour tanking Iskur died because my capacitor booster couldn’t keep up with the energy draining. I shouldn’t have been using cap booster 100, the small cap booster can only fit three charges and then needs to recharge.


Lesson 2: I need different ship set-ups for different types of encounters, after losing the second Iskur I flew back to the encounter with my passive shield Myrmidon and was perfectly safe, his neuting didn’t matter and his warriors couldn’t break the tank, I will have to see if Hammerheads could break the tank.


Lesson 3. I need to understand the mechanics of session change better. In the first fight I was circling the wormhole and was half way through armour before I realised I was being attacked. I tried to jump through the wormhole into high sec and got a session change in progress. When the ship blew up I tried in my pod and he managed to lock me and get me half way through structure before I managed to jump through the wormhole.


Lesson 4. I need a smart-bombing ship that can take out drones.


Lesson 5. I need to sort out my overview – I need hostile ships, hostile drones.



* What sort of person calls their character Tester128?

Tactical use of Wormhole Space

When one is used to the uniform nature of known space it is easy to ignore the tactical considerations that wormhole systems can confer on ships.

Last night we successfully ran an anomaly in a class 5 system with assault frigates, stealth bombers and 2 guardians. Up to then we would have all tooled up in Dominix battleships warped in and sat still while the sleepers would come at us. Last night that static battleplan changed forever.

The system in question reduced the signature radius of ships, improves small weapons and the remote repping of armour. A perfect combination for our set up of assault frigates and logistic ships. The fly in the ointment was the loss of 3 ships, 2 Manticores and 1 Taranis. The Manticore losses both happened at the spawning of a new wave, first time it just popped to alpha damage, the second time it fell to the second volley. The Taranis disappeared to a 9k shot from the last ship in the anomaly just as he was going down, we are not sure why this happened.

Of course we all prefer to note that the three ships that popped were all repped by one of the Guardians pilots whereas those of us being repped by the other all survived…

For those newer to Eve, small signature radius allows you to avoid most damage that large weapons do. Or to put it another way, if the same weapons hit a bigger ship they would do more damage. My Assault frigate sailed through this explosion with all the sleeper battleships throwing missiles at it.

One of the truisms of wormhole space is that it is cold and dangerous, NBSI (not blue shoot it) is the standard and people you come across on scan will tend to be bait for a TRAP OF DOOM. Mr Lazybones above wasn't actually bait, he was just an ordinary victim picked on for being alone, next door and visable. Sometimes I wonder about the souls of the corporation members, the pearly white gates certainly won't be swinging open for them as they approach.

Nice name, pity about the place Mr Lazybones chose to loiter.

One of the advantages of Wormhole space is that every so often you get a nice WH to a quiet 0,0 system perfect for ratting. This opportunity lead to Slayfoe's Bull taking his Myrmidon and doing his part on exterminating the pirate scum that live in Delve - Blood Raiders! Persistance paid off and my first faction drop, an EM smartbomb, dropped. Sold in Jita for 28m, not bad for an evenings ratting.

For those that didn't know, any ship that has Dark in front of it's name in Blood Raider space is your primary and your piggy bank - unless you get some faction ammo :) Handy link to the equivilants in the different parts of the Eve universe.

The value of Crokite

As time passes in the game interest meanders. I took a few days out in high sec to sell some Crokite and grind some Duvolle labs reputation. First things first, compressed ore is great! A suitable wormhole allowed the corp to ship the compressed ore to Jita. 2.5 Crokite mining sessions sold for about 60million. A faction EM bomb dropped for me last week and that sold for 28m so with 4 L4 missions and their salvage I had over 100m for the first time in ages.

What it really high-lighted was how valuable the wormhole grav sites are. I have been popping out into low sec and null sec recently and Arkonor, Bistot and Crokite are really rare. While selling the ore I really came to realise the difference of value between the ores. GIVE ARKONOR!

Contrary to the photographic evidence above, Slay does not frequent Krull's Pleasure Dome as a customer...

Wormholers Guide to the Regions - Aridia

A wormhole popped me out here last weekend and for the record here are a few of the impressions that I got.

1. It is far away from ANYWHERE! I calculated routes to Dodixie (30 something jumps), Tash Murkon (27 jumps) and Jita (44 jumps). Unfortunately my covert ops fell prey to a gang in my way back home so I had to fly the route from my clone bay (Tash Murkon) to Aridia.

2. It is low sec with a tiny island of high sec.

3. It is busy enough, I saw 2 gangs but they chose not to engage my shuttle.

4. It serves as a connection from Empire to Delve (0,0 space)

Minding Fort

Well minding the fort is not the most engaging of activites. Most of the corp had taken off for a bit of piracy in another wormhole. Those of left behind were tasked with staying alive. Something I failed to do over the weekend as my trusty Helios, Slay’s Wayfinder, died a tragic death caught at a hole by dictor. Fortunately we had already found a low sec exit in Aridia that allowed me back in a shuttle.

So come Sunday we found another way back in just as another corp found our WH and set up camp on the WH out. We ran through the ambush, re-shipped and headed for the WH they had come through. Rubico was first on scene, Slay following in an Ishkur, Slay’s Way. Draconica landed in grid with a Myrmidon and after that I was too busy trying to keep Slay alive to notice anyone. The Phobos we jumped was naturally bait. Seems to be the only type of ship we run into these days. Recons and Stealth bombers uncloaked and the fight was on.

First order of the day, strategic withdrawal. Rubico and Draconica got out as Slay aligned to planet 3 and home. The Arazu on Slay was tenacious and the Falcon locking down the targeting wouldn’t let go, fortunately the trusty Warrior II’s don’t need much encouragement to beat up ships! The home system has armour rep advantages and this must have kept Slay’s ship together, flames pouring from the engines as it strained to escape. It felt like an eternity, but the Arazu must have capped out and his Scram failed, and the Ishkur disappeared into warp and home.
Having taken a beating our fearless leader mocked them in local as people re-shipped again. Slay spent 5 minutes with a hull repairer going flat out before it was decided to try again.

Again the Ishkur, hastily refitted with a capacitor booster (thanks for the suggestion Mono) warped into battle. This time with the rest of the corp positioned round the hole in stealth bombers. An Onyx heavy interdictor appeared and locked before spewing out heavy precision missiles. His mate in an Arazu was next, the bait was well taken but the Ishkur’s armour is strong! The Arazu found himself lit up with target painters and torpedoes rained down on him from the stealth bombers, Aelius not quite fast enough to get out got popped with the Arazu as Slay entered close orbit round the Onyx. The Onyx’s guns couldn’t track Slay and Slay’s drones and blasters couldn’t break his tank, he retreated through the WH.

Soon after he was followed by a stealth bomber and covert ops. The system was once again ours. Casualties were light on both sides, one stealth bomber exchanged for a Arazu recon but the excitement and adrenaline was good.

Locator Agents and Wormhole Space

This question of trying to find someone in wormhole space came up last night so I thought I would try it out. Slayfoe's Bull was offline at the POS in the wormhole system when Carraig asked this nice Duvolle Labs agent where he might be, this was her answer.

For those too lazy to click:

"I'm sorry but I just can't help you with that one, I'm pretty sure Slayfoe's Bull's well out of my zone of influence"

Getting beaten up

Last night we had a good online presence, the Euro-zone players were busy mining next door when the Americans started to logon. I believe the encounter started with Drifnir getting jumped by a Legion while in a Mammoth hauling gas home to the POS. Everyone made for the POS and jumped into a hodgepodge of PVP and not so PVP ships. A little while later someone had a point on a Loki at the sun.

In retrospect I should have got suspicious right there, but I thought that maybe someone had called out the wrong name of a ship in the excitement and into a C5b Domi jumped Slay and warped in on top of Mono. I am not used to PVP and it takes a little while to be able to discern what is happening in the chaos of a fight but the ships rapidly filling up the sky were not purple.

We had fallen for bait.

They were called Black-Wing, there were 12 of them in a mix of tech 2 cruisers, battle cruisers and tech 3 ships. They focused fire, knew what they were doing and had us blown up and podded before we even understood the depth of our mistake. We lost 3? Dominix, Mono’s Pilgrim, Drif’s Mammoth and our capsules. I wasn’t even able to align and warp out before I was in a new clone in TashMurkon. Link to killboard.

Bought myself 2x +3implants (all I had the ISK left for), picked up a Myrmidon left in high-sec after the last move and flew back to the POS.

Gang PVP

We move into out new home, meet the neighbours and declare war. We camp a WH waiting for them to come out, it turns out that there are rather more of them than we anticipated and we need to stage a 'strategic withdrawal', at least I assume that is what it was called as I hadn't any comms so I was watching the others VERY carefully. As it turns out, the WH collapses behind the last one of us out leaving two of them with no where to run to and a fight against 4 domis.

The picture is of the domis greiving the loss of there new Abadon mate that was left behind next door. Not sure of the final tally at the moment though I do note that it was the trusty tier 1 domis that survived!

Time-out from Wormhole Space

I have been a bit busy in RL recently and haven’t been able to endulge in flying space ships round as much. I do have blog pack on my iGoogle though and catch up with various blogs as much as I can.
Today my favorite was http://evewarrior.com/archives/irritation. He started me thinking. At the moment MNEE has just folded up camp in the class 4 that kept us in sleeper loot for the last two months with the intention of moving to a deeper class 5 with a static class 6 connection. As a result we are in high sec with some time on our hands.
The word in Eve Warriors blog that got me thinking was ‘passive targeting’. I wouldn’t mind picking some fights with some can flippers. This is my plan.
Carraig sits in a belt in a retriever kitted out with a warp scrambler, passive targeting and mining strip. She jet mines into a can dropped by Slay who sits in a Brutix off grid. As soon as some one bites Carraig scrambles and Slay warps in. If a flipper shoots Carraig then Concord should arrive to help as Carraig has rights over the flipper but the flipper has no rights over Carraig.
Hmm, this might be a bit of fun. Carriag needs to learn about Propulsion Jamming then it is a matter of fitting out a retriever with warp scrambler and plates or maybe better, an Exequror as it can fit plates, 4 mining lasers, passive targeting, warp scrambler and afterburner for when they try to run away. I think I’ll take some ECM drones with me should the flipper try to shoot me.
Slay’s Brutix will be set up as a glass cannon, what other way would you fly it? Only thing missing now is a border system near some low sec pirate haven with some roids to shoot at.

When your Eyes are Bigger than your Stomach

I have been busy lately so I was pleasantly surprised on Monday when I logged on to find that I was in a fleet of 12, mainly MNEE pilots with a scattering of Caldari Incorporated. Everyone was 1 system over either shooting sleepers or mining a core deposit.

Slayfoe’s job was to take the catalyst and clean up after the shooters while Carraig shot away at a Jaspet rock, 2 full cans of Jaspet later and the hauler announced a teeny problem, the WH was on it’s last legs.

At this point there are 3 Hulks, a Retriever, an Iteron V, Slay in a Catalyst and a pile of battleships. It is patently clear that not everyone is going to get home. Naturally it happened at the end of the evening when everyone on this side of the pond wants to get to bed.

In a very disciplined manner the miners were packed off home leaving combat pilots sitting in their BS waiting for rescue. Drifnir, being an active guy headed off through a low sec WH (that was too small for the BS to pass through) to get himself a scanning ship. While in known space fitting this out he gets an Evemail announcing the death of his ship. Amazing how good the post office is at finding it’s way out of WH space...

Lessons learnt: never leave a shiny ship alone, someone will take advantage. What we couldn’t understand is why someone blew it up rather then steal it, it was about 300million worth of ship.

Took this shot last night while warping with the fleet to another sleeper anomoly. Looks like Rubico's Raven got tired and hitched a lift! It was a large system and the jump was over 200AU so with him being a squid face and all it probably is understandable.

Wormhole collapsing

For the protection of our assets we collapsed a wormhole tonight.

Earlier that evening Draconica had been mining in a hulk and got jumped and blown up by Max Leadfoot of Explorers Corp Directive. Hoping that he would make a break for it we hung round the wormhole waiting for him to make a run for it. The wormhole collapsed and he escaped through the new one that appeared.

He appeared quite eager to return and visit more misery on us so we collapsed the wormhole by shuttling battleships backwards and forwards through it. For the record, X877 wormholes take 1,849.28 million mass before collapsing.

Tourney

When watching our holds fill with gas got a bit much we decided that shooting each other in tech 1 ships might more interesting. MNEE are industrialists at heart, we mine, explore, manufacture, invent and mission when we need money. PVP has never really caught on, at least voluntary PVP, the other kind we have had plenty of. War declarations seem to follow us as we migrate from alliance to alliance.

So it is not unfair to categorise most of us as pvp noobs. With this in mind we started with a free for all, all of warped to a planet with a view to see who would be the last man standing. That quickly was shown to be rather chaotic and my ship had flames emerging from it for the rest of the night.

Next we tried to more structured 1 on 1. Rubico in his Caracal played cat and mouse with the Thoraxes and was declared winner. Then MCHammered logged on, took one of the Thorax and showed us how it is supposed to be done. By the time I logged off for the night he had beaten the Caracal 3 times.

It was fun. Next time we need to set some base rules:

Warp in time. The first to arrive has an advantage over the second to arrive.
Distance. Ships are either designed to get up close and dirty (Gallente) or keep their range (Caldari).
No blowing people up. Rubico came to the first engagement in frigate hoping that he could orbit faster than my guns could keep up. Most of the time he was right but when he got 5xlight neutron blasters in the face he found himself in his POD.
We need to fit out an ambulance with shield, armour and hull repairers.

Gas mining

So the proverbial goldmine turned up twice over the weekend. Class 5 systems produced ladar sites full of C320 (going for ISK160k/ unit in Jita that night) and C540 (going for rather less). The spawns are battleship size supported by frigates. Needless to say the gas mining ships are not really enough to take these out so we bring in remote repairing Dominix to take down the spawns. This has the unfortunate effect of putting a serious dent into the home system wormhole.

You need a hauler, my hold can hold 40 units or 6minutes of mining. One Iteron III can keep up with 3 maxed out gas miners across 4 wormholes.

I mine in a Myrmidon, with a co-processor it can fit 5 tech2 gas miners and a tank, just (499.75/ 500 teraflops). Each cycle take 1.5minutes and pulls in 10 units. That is ISK1.6m/ 90 seconds or about ISK60m/hour. Not much compares to that.

It isn’t the most exciting of Eve time but with voice communications, the thrill of unknowns entering the system, the corporation wallet expanding it is acceptable.

The second night we mined for a bit then had a tourney. If mining is watching paint dry, then gas mining is watching dry paint fade…

Podded!

Podded for the first time ever!

On Sunday morning a wormhole opened into a clean type 4 system when most of the corporation was online. So we promptly went about harvesting the goodies. Just before downtime I asked for someone to sit on the wormhole so Carraig could warp to them and then home. Mono volunteered but went to the outbound wormhole not the wormhole heading home. We both jumped through, realised the mistake, jumped back and downtime hit. Carraig was stranded.
When the server went back up Slay went to rescue her before Aileen and myself went into town for lunch. He jumped to the wormhole connecting to the home system, jumped through with the intention of giving Carraig a target and promptly got hit by an Azaru who shredded the Iteron III that Slay was flying.
Carraig in the Retriever warped to the dying Slay and straight through the wormhole without any trouble and then home. When I realised Slay was under attack, I must have given up on the Iteron and prepared myself to warp through in the capsule. Unfortunately I kept getting ‘Session Change in progress’ and in surprisingly short time, found myself back in Duripant thinking that only that morning I had commented on how safe the home system felt.
Drifnir was good enough to find me a connection to high-sec for Slayfoe to get back to the POS system in a PVP Thorax.
Lesson learnt? Well if you can’t get through the wormhole then warp elsewhere instead. He probably had a point on me (preventing me warping out) but I’ll never know.

Fueling a POS

To keep a POS up and runnign you need to provide it with various fuels that are supplied by NPCs in known space.

The fixed amount of the following items are required per day/ week/ month:

Enriched uranium
Helium isotopes
Robotics
Collant
Mechanical parts
Oxygen

The amount of these items required depends on the CPU and Power requirements of what you run at the POS:

Liquid ozone (power)
Heavy water (CPU)

Then a last item, Strontium Clathrade, is required to fuel the POS when it is put into reinforced mode, this happens when it is attacked.

The amount of the various items can be calculated at the following useful place:
http://eve-online.itemdrop.net/eve_db/calculator/pos_fuel/
It also shows you how much volume yuo will need to haul on a weekly basis - looks like an IttyV will do the job each week, also looks like the corp/I will need to find about 21m per week to keep it operational.

Setting up a POS

Last night the chief of our little corp decided to set up a second POS in the system to cater for the miners among us (2 at the last count). It is a medium amarr tower with corporate hangar array and medium intensity refining array with a slew of guns to deter the casual looter.

Notes to self: it takes AGES to set up a pos as the tower can only handle 1 thing at a time and each addition to the pos needs anchored (5 minutes) and onlined (another 5 mins). So apart from the tower, the 16 odd items should take 160 minutes to work, or about 3 hours. Each gun then needs ammo loaded, first time I have ever loaded a laser into a turret but it obviously makes sense to use guns that dont require ammo - hence lasers with crystals.

Now all I need to do is find some rocks to mine.

The whole operation requires various types of fuel to keep running, this needs to be fetched from empire space, so I can see some runs to high sec soon. This naturally will cost money so I need to establish how the money side of the operation is to happen and how to pay for the fuel. Mono says that there is a fuel dump in Amarr space ready for picking up as soon as we get a suitable WH.

So we'll have a POS tower with a refining array to refine the materials we already have mined, this might take a few days, it isn't like at stations where it happens immediately. The question will be what to do with the minerals. Sell or manufacture.

1. Selling: will require hauling the minerals to high sec when a suitable WH appears.
2. Manufacturing: either for use by the corp or alliance in WH space or for selling. Selling means dragging the products to high sec when appropriate WH appears.

Hmm, might be better to make stuff that can be sold to the corp or the alliance in WH space.